04/04/13 by Ross Wilson

20/03/13 by Ross Wilson

Our latest app is now available to download from the App Store.

At Kotikan we allocate some of our time to investigating new ideas and technologies. The design team wanted to take a fresh look at some common problems, taking an existing app concept and enhancing it.

18/12/12 by Ross Wilson

23/11/12 by Charles Harley

In October Robert Hewitt and I visited Droidcon UK in London. As always it was a great couple of days, there were loads of good talks and interesting people to meet. We wanted to learn as much as we could and it’s the perfect place to find out what’s new in Android and what new techniques or technologies we can use to make our apps better.

We also wanted to share a bit of what we've learnt over the last year. The need for apps to be translated into a large number of different languages can cause some real issues. Recently we’ve come up with some ways of solving these problems which we thought might be useful to other developers. In particular, the techniques we use to improve the layout of localised text using auto resizing and more flexible truncation.

12/09/12 by Robert Hewitt

When writing code the goal is always to write little and make what you do write in reusable components. Android has always had the ability to parse the XML attributes defined when constructing a view but little used is the ability for custom attributes to be applied.

Let’s say we want to extend the functionality of an EditText to have a range applied so there are bounds to the input. This could be used for limited text entry when entering information into a database.

20/06/12 by Ross Wilson

The official apps for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2012 are available now. You can download them for free on Android and iPhone.

This August, Kotikan and Edinburgh Festival Fringe are hoping to build on the success of last year and we thought you might be interested to hear some facts about the 2011 apps.

01/06/12 by Ross Wilson

We recently appeared on the BBC News. While job prospects are tough for young people in the UK, there is a shortage of skilled IT people. Innovative technology companies like Kotikan are creating a range of opportunities for young people to get involved in an exciting, dynamic industry.

19/04/12 by Ross Wilson

There are many good reasons to undertake the development of a mobile app but after all the effort of creating an amazing Android or iPhone offering it’s important to ensure it has the right marketing to make it a success. This blog post aims to give readers some insight into the process of marketing a new app release. It’s not a template for a complete app marketing strategy but a guide built on some of the learnings we’ve taken from our own experiences, both good and bad .

10/02/12 by Andrew Williams

Two of Kotikan's senior developers, Charles and Nick battle it out to decide which platform is best when it comes to developing apps.

Informative, competitive and of course completely objective.

This talk was delivered at Student Techmeetup, Edinburgh on 1 February 2012

18/01/12 by Ross Wilson

2011 was an exciting year for mobile with some great surprises; Nokia partnering with Microsoft, Android thriving, Blackberry struggling and Apple not really launching an iPhone 5. In an effort to show off our expertise (or ridiculous daydreams) we asked a selection of the Kotikan team their thoughts about what might lie ahead for mobile in 2012.

09/12/11 by Ross Wilson

Merry Christmas,

Kotikan have had such a fantastic year that we wanted to do something special to say Merry Christmas and thank you to all the amazing people we’ve worked with.

We'd like to invite you to join in all the fun of a snowball fight without getting cold hands, soggy gloves or accidentally picking up some unpleasantly coloured snow.

07/11/11 by Ross Wilson

Kotikan was delighted to be presented with the award sponsored by heraldscotland.com for the Skyscanner All Flights, Everywhere! app.

Judges said they were impressed by the rich functionality, intuitive interface and the reception the app has received. Skyscanner All Flights, Everywhere iPhone app has reached number one free travel app spot in 42 territories and hit 1 million downloads within a month of release.

30/03/11 by Gavin Dutch

While we've been busy making apps over the last year we've been thinking a lot about our identity. Its become clear that while Loc8 Solutions has successfully grown and developed, we've expanded from a focus on location based apps to encompass the whole spectrum of mobile development. This meant that 'Loc8 Solutions' was no longer a great fit for our company and we needed a change to reflect our position.

30/03/11 by Marius Ciocanel

Apps on the iPhone all run in a sandbox. Great for security but not so great for developers. We recently had the requirement to communicate between two of our applications and so set out to find an elegant solution. The best way to manage communication between apps appears to be through registered URL handlers, here is an outline of how to set that up.